The Leewit @ghost_bird@witches.town

ITIL training today is off to a good start, as we learn the course materials got sent to the wrong address. I thought the Methodology(TM) was supposed to prevent that?

The new Star Wars film is fine, but I think it’s time to stop making films (and TV and books and comics and games) for fans and have another go at making things that are actually good.

“[A] commendable after-dinner cheese... made of one part each ripe Camembert and Roquefort to two parts of sharp American, melted gently into two parts of heavy cream and seasoned with a dash of cayenne.” - MFK Fisher

Why? I mean, American cheese isn’t great but why do that to ripe Camembert and Roquefort?

Neither of them has the faintest idea about cheese, though. Sharp cheddar blended with condensed milk and mustard as “a pleasant fabrication with fruit after a meal”?

Interestingly, “With Bold Knife and Fork” turns out to be in dialogue with “The I Hate to Cook Book”. They’re a few years apart, but I think the real divide is aspirational upper-middle vs aspirational lower-middle class.

(Unless you’re baking, precision in recipes is mostly spurious and it does no good to pretend otherwise. Ingredients differ; tastes differ.)

And now I’m reading MFK Fisher’s “With Bold Knife and Fork” which is said to be a great classic of American food writing but gets off to a bad start with an essay against imprecision in recipes.

(The recipes look terrible, by and large, but the intensely practical attitude - for certain values of practical - is valuable.)

Just finished reading “The I Hate to Cook Book”, which - I think - is absolutely packed with very specific class markers that I can’t completely decode because I’m not a white American in 1962.

“His wife was really to be pitied, because he had been the only person in the house who understood how to manage the cook's temper, and now she has to put "D.V." on her dinner invitations. Still, that's better than a domestic scandal; a woman who leaves her cook never wholly recovers her position in Society.”

“There was a fellow I stayed with once in Warwickshire who farmed his own land, but was otherwise quite steady. Should never have suspected him of having a soul, yet not very long afterwards he eloped with a lion-tamer's widow and set up as a golf-instructor somewhere on the Persian Gulf; dreadfully immoral, of course, because he was only an indifferent player, but still, it showed imagination.”